Jive Software secures $15 million… and moves blog to Clearspace

One with considerable momentum is Jive Software, a Portland, Ore. Its product, Clearspace, doesn’t tack various software programs together. It offers it all from ground-up: It lets employees and customers collaborate on a mix of blogs, wikis, forums, chat, tagging, files and reputation systems into a single interface behind the corporate firewall (or outside it, if customers are involved, in which case it governs a publishing system that controls what gets outside the firewall). The company was bootstrapped for years, but in February, hit a vein, says chief executive Dave Hersh — demand for its product became overwhelming.

Jive will do more than $15 million in sales this year, with the second quarter revenue almost double what it was the same quarter of last year. It has more than 2,000 customers, says Hersh, mentioning names like IBM, Sun and BEA. So it has taken $15 million from Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital, to handle the growth.

Jive said it plans to use the money to continue developing its software and to market its products. Jive is the latest company to benefit from a surge in venture capital backing Oregon businesses. Venture capitalists invested $173 million in Oregon companies during the first six months of the year, up from $76 million in the first half last year.

Still no post on the Jive blog or in the Jive newsroom, so I’ll provide other details as they become available.

[UPDATE] As of Monday morning, still nothing from the horse’s mouth, but Om Malik is reporting that the funding will be used to “push sales and marketing of its Clearspace line-up of products,” while Portland station KGW has pulled an AP story that states, “The company said it will be scaling up operations, development and setting up international offices as a result of the investment.”

In related news, when I headed over to the Jive blog to see if they had posted anything, I was happy to see that they had ported their blog to their own Clearspace product. “Eating their own dogfood” as it were.